Organising and maintaining customer data are both inevitable for either growing businesses nor matured businesses. Not only it’s essential for marketing division only. It’s as important as the core business itself. How can this be considered unessential? When you can record your customer data perfectly and then store it for your strategic decision reference, you can get more than just an insights. You can truly understand how your customers are behaving towards your products or services.

Talking about establishing and managing customer data, we know that the common terms or technology that pervasively used by MSMEs or Enterprises is Customer Relationship Management or CRM Software. And for that specific kind of terms, many CRM software have been developed to support the CRM Activities. You name it; Salesforces, Hubspot, Zoho, etc.

Figure 1. Photo by Choong Deng Xiang on Unsplash

We truly understand that CRM software has been helping your marketing and sales activities for maybe a couple of years, or maybe even longer. We know, that you can not only store your customers data, but even more, you can set up some follow up schedules, rating your customers’ Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), or any other kind of things that you can do within. It’s sort of all in one sales & marketing tools, right?

But, when I mention about Customer Data Platform or we can call it CDP, would you be familiar with the terms?

Figure 2. Global Search Trends of CDP and CRM sourced from Google Trends

We have conducted a simple research comparing the search trends of “CRM” to the search trends of “CDP”. The simplified result showed that only 1 in 8 people who searched about “CDP” compared to “CRM”. This suggested that if you know about CDP, you’re in the minority of 12,5% people who searched for it. While the majority (maybe) are still using the CRM or even intending to use CRM, CDP remains as an extension of CRM but has not been known yet by the market.

CDP is also a sales & marketing tools. But, we can say that it’s more advanced. To better know about it, let’s just compare it to CRM:

	Customer Data Platform	Customer Relationship Management
Primary Functions	It centralises and unifies customer data from various sources into a single view	Contain customer data, enabling the marketing and sales to use it for managing customer interaction
Data Source	Integrates multiple data from various channels (online, offline, third-party)	Collects data primarily from direct interactions between business and customer (calls, emails, transaction)
Focus Area	Data aggregation, analysis, and segmentation	Tracking, managing, nurturing customer relationships
Data Type	Manages various kind of data starting from the structured ones, the unstructured ones, until the semi-structured ones	Handles only structured data that is related to sales & supports

The key differences of both tools are on the primary function. While CDP focuses for data-driven marketing personalisation. On the other hand CRM aims to manage customer data. But when we take a look at more higher grounds towards the CDP and CRM, they’re both complementary. As we have already said it to you that the CDP is the extension of the CRM. From which, we can take a conclusion that if you have already adopted CRM, you can get more advanced on your sales & marketing strategy by adopting the CDP.

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